Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r10. Here are the differences from v9r9. This is an incremental release but if you are a user of likelihood you will want to switch to the new release.
The first public distribution of the Science Tools was released on Feb. 6 by the FSSC. You will see that they have binary distributions for several versions of Linux and Mac OS X. Eric W. reports that Ubuntu builds have also just been made. The FSSC distribution is based on v9r8p2 of the Science Tools; the public distribution is a subset of the packages of our builds.
Data products: No new news about reprocessing
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
v9r10 includes Steve Fegan's speed-up of the evaluations of the likelihood function. Speed-ups seem to be by a factor of ~2. This is really like something for nothing, and Jim points out that it should be especially noticeable in gtfindsrc.
Jim reports that it also includes the fix for the gtsrcmaps offset issue found by Jean Ballet, who found that the diffuse model for the Galactic plane was displaced by ~0.5 pixel after convolution in gtsrcmaps.
And he reports that v9r10 addresses interface requests from Jean for pyLikelihood. This includes allowing users to select plot colors and line styles.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news - Masa is still working on other FSSC tasks.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Jim points out that v9r10 includes a new version of the tip package that allows large (>2^31 row) FITS tables, if you want to use files that large. This is not currently working on the Windows builds.
Jim also points out that v9r10 includes handling of phi-dependence of IRFs in irfs/latResponse and irfs/handoff_response. Azimuth dependence is not currently included in IRFs distributed with the Science Tools, or in the evaluation of livetime cubes, but that is coming.
Source Catalog
The Bright Source List paper is out and the main table is available in various forms from the FSSC.